It’s been a rough summer for health care. Sixteen of the 23 federally funded, not-for-profit Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans (co-ops) have now failed. Humana reduced its Georgia coverage area and Cigna, UnitedHealthcare and Aetna have completely pulled out of Georgia’s federally managed insurance exchange. Most premium rate increase requests for 2017 are in the double digits – the weighted average increase is 27 percent. We got ours in the mail last week: 16 percent.

There are roughly 2,000 judges in Georgia, serving at every level of the judicial system from the state Supreme Court all the way down to local magistrate judges.

The great majority of these men and women are honorable people who try to do a decent job of making sure justice is served in their courtrooms. But there are occasionally dishonest or emotionally disturbed people who have to be removed from their judgeships for the good of the community.

No matter who wins what many are calling “the most frustrating, unpleasant presidential election in American history,” I’m sure more than one person has wondered why the two major candidates don’t just duel it out and be done with it – or hand said weapons to their campaign managers or surrogates and let one side finish the other off.

If you want to see how badly politicians can mess up a state, look no further than our neighbor North Carolina.

On March 23, the North Carolina legislature met in special session to pass the now-infamous HB2, a bill that restricted transgender people to using only government and school bathrooms that corresponded to the sex listed on their birth certificate. The bill also killed an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by Charlotte to protect the civil rights of gays.

Older brothers will ultimately take over the world. They will take control of our minds, our thoughts, and our toys. They will change life as we know it one head game at a time. It will happen so gradually, no one will notice until it’s too late.

My older brother, so deep in the conspiracy himself that it hardly seems a surreptitious movement to him anymore, tries to convince me that robots are humanity’s greatest threat. He sends me links to articles titled Rise of the Machines and Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100.

Following my previous column, contrasting getting older with being a senior citizen, here’s another take on the same subject, a somewhat different view of my life today from the one I concocted three-quarters of a lifetime ago …

I live in constant surprise about the things that don’t happen to me. For example, I rarely come face to face with a man wearing a bowtie. Odds are that men in bowties should cross my path more often.

And when one of my children swings a dead squirrel on a string over his head in the backyard, it never hits me when its foot slips out of the loop, sending the rodent flying in a randomly selected direction.